Xunzi

First published Tue Feb 13, 2007

Xunzi (“Master
Xun”)[1]
was one of the most sophisticated and influential philosophers of
China's Warring States period (479–221 B.C.E.). He considered
himself a follower of Confucius and was one of the central early
figures in the consolidation of what came to be thought of as the
Confucian tradition. Xunzi's significance has often been
underestimated, with most prominent Confucians since the Song dynasty
aligning themselves with his rival Mencius. His writings address
topics ranging from economic and military policy, through the
justification of traditional authority and institutions, to action
theory and the philosophy of language.

There is little to go on in constructing an account of Xunzi's
life. The Xunzi itself includes few hints, and it is hard to
reconcile later (Han dynasty) sources with one another. There is
accordingly a great deal of scholarly disagreement about how to fill
in the details of Xunzi's biography. What is relatively certain is
that Xunzi was born in the northern state of Zhao towards the end of
the 4th century B.C.E., that he flourished in the middle of the 3rd
century, and that he died at an old age sometime after 238.

Surviving sources mention two official posts held by Xunzi. For a
time he had an advisory position in the eastern state of Qi, and later
was given an administrative post by the southern state of Chu, in
territory that Chu acquired by conquest in perhaps 254 B.C.E. Xunzi lost
the latter post when his sponsor died in 238; this is the latest
reasonably secure date in Xunzi's biography, though there is one
source that implies (implausibly) that he lived to see the founding of
the Chinese empire by the western state of Qin in 221 B.C.E.

The Xunzi reports audiences with the kings both of Zhao, his
home state, and of (pre-imperial) Qin. Another passage may report an
interview with a prime minister from Qi, though Xunzi's interlocutor
in this passage is not identified in all textual traditions.

Xunzi had at least one influential student in Li Si, who is widely
considered the intellectual architect of the Qin unification. There is
also a tradition that Xunzi taught the philosopher Han Feizi, but this
is not as well supported. Other students of Xunzi's seem to have
dominated the transmission of several texts that were later canonized,
such as the Odes; this helped give Xunzi an extensive influence
on Han dynasty thought.

Probably the bulk of the Xunzi was composed during Xunzi's
lifetime and under his supervision. It is likely he did much of the
writing himself (only a small number of passages depict him in the
third person). It is also probable that his followers continued to add
to the corpus after his death. Some texts in the Xunzi
display signs of later editing, especially interpolation. At some
point—or perhaps over an extended period, and perhaps while
parts were still being written—the corpus was organized into
‘books’ (more precisely, scrolls), at least partly on
thematic grounds, and the books were given titles that reflect their
dominant themes. Towards the end of the first century B.C.E., the Han
imperial librarian Liu Xiang collated the available materials,
producing a collection of 32 books. The Xunzi reached its
current form near the beginning of the 9th century C.E., when the
commentator Yang Liang put these books in their now-standard
order.

The complicated history of the Xunzi, like that of other
ancient texts, raises difficult problems of interpretation. Although
there are views that are characteristic of the Xunzi as a
whole, there is little reason to expect various developments of these
views to agree in detail. This means that it is probably a mistake
simply to sum up what is said in different passages, and attribute the
resulting construction to Xunzi. But in the near total absence of any
clues that tie specific texts to specific periods in the careers of
Xunzi and his followers, it is difficult to be appropriately sensitive
to biographical
considerations.[2]
It is generally best to defer questions of how the ideas advanced in
distinct passages fit together—in a system, a career, or
otherwise—until after detailed study of the passages taken
individually. This undermines some entrenched interpretive habits, and
can make exposition somewhat awkward, but offers other rewards.

At the heart of Xunzi's philosophy was his conception of social and
political order, and his faith in a tradition that he thought embodied
it. He sometimes referred to this tradition with the phrase
li-yi, “rituals and duties,” emphasizing two of its
central aspects. People occupied hierarchically-organized roles, and
were to act according to the duties of their roles. Traditional
rituals and other artificial social forms would help ensure they did
this by transforming natural human behavior, so that people would not
indulge their desires in ways that lead to disorder, but would instead
conform to the Way. The social system as a whole would be overseen by
gentlemen (junzi), guided by a class of erudites that Xunzi
referred to as
ru.[3]
These would be men whose education and
social position gave them the perspective and virtue to oversee the
myriad particular activities that Xunzi considered necessary for an
orderly state.

Much of Xunzi's philosophy is based upon a distinction between what
is natural or spontaneous and what is a product of human effort. Xunzi
conceived of nature—including human nature—as an
unchanging context for human action and organization. In his view,
human endeavors succeed or fail because of how they respond to this
fixed context—not because of any natural advantages or
disadvantages, and especially not because nature rewards the virtuous
and punishes the wicked. In particular, he believed that the stability
of a society largely depends on its ability to respond to the fact
that natural human desires outrun naturally available
resources. Central to his defense of the Way that he advocated was the
claim that it was uniquely capable of doing this, by strengthening and
enriching the state, by providing social and political structures to
regulate people's attempts to satisfy their desires, and by
fundamentally transforming people's characters.

Because Xunzi thought of the natural context of human activity as a
constant, he also claimed that his Way was constant. It had been
invented by ancient sages, and there was no further need to improve or
adjust it. In Book 5, he rejects the argument, which we find in texts
such as the Zhuangzi and the Book of Lord Shang, that in
different times, because of their different conditions, order must be
pursued in different ways; in his view, the Way devised by the sage
kings was adequate to all times and conditions. Thus, the Way is not
only the product of human effort and invention, it is also a completed
product, and now all that is required is that we master it and
transmit it to future generations. One could go so far as to argue
that this is the primary significance of Xunzi's claims about the
origins of the Way—that he attributes the Way to ancient sages
primarily because this allows him both to insist that the Way is the
product of human innovation and to deny that there is any need for
further innovation. Certainly he does not go into the sort of detail
one might expect if he were genuinely interested in developing a
narrative of the past.

There were many who challenged the socio-political institutions and
practices that Xunzi endorsed—not for nothing was this known as
the period of a hundred schools. Most vulnerable were his claims on
behalf of erudites and rituals, which were universally rejected
outside the Confucian tradition.

Philosophically, his most important rivals were probably the
Mohists.[4]
They had argued that social order requires moderation, and they took this
to imply a rejection of the lavish rituals that Xunzi advocated; they
also attacked the ru erudites ferociously. But they were nonetheless
one of Xunzi's most important influences: although he rejected Mohist
positions, to a large extent he adopted their argument strategies; he
also seems to have learned a great deal from the Mohist conception of
fa (models, standards). (On both these points, see below.) By
contrast, though Xunzi defended the traditionalism and ritualism of
the ru erudites, he did not otherwise owe them a significant
philosophical debt. One might go so far as to say that Xunzi used
philosophy he had learned from the Mohists to defend doctrines he
inherited from the ru.

Other important challenges to which Xunzi responded came from
thinkers now often classified as Daoists and
Legalists.[5]
Daoists typically privileged spontaneity, and rejected morality and
ritual as artificial human constructs. Some of them remained committed
to authoritarian rule, others advocated dropping out of political
society entirely. The Legalists were philosophers and officials who
focused on developing practical techniques for rulers to secure and
administer territory, and to preserve their control over their
subjects, particularly the aristocracy and the emerging
bureaucracy. Many such thinkers considered traditional moral values to
be of no use, and argued against using them to guide the acquisition
and exercise of power.

The brief account of Xunzi given in the Shi Ji
incorporates a nice summation of Xunzi's intellectual orientation:

Xun Qing hated the policies of a corrupt age, when lost
states and chaotic rulers suited each other, not following the Great
Way but engaging in witchcraft and placing their trust in
blessings. Base erudites (ru) were petty and inflexible, like
Zhuang Zhou and that sort, and also brought turmoil and chaotic
customs. At this, [Xunzi] pushed the moral practices of the erudites
and the Mohists.

This emphasizes Xunzi's advocacy of virtuous rule and his opposition
to superstition (an important corollary of his philosophy of
nature). It indicates the importance Xunzi placed on attacking what he
took to be unorthodox teachings. The passage relies on a distinction
between base erudites and the erudites with whom Xunzi allied himself;
this reflects a concern found repeatedly in Xunzi's writings, to
separate the true followers of Confucius off from other learned
people. Here, the base erudites are represented by Zhuangzi, a Daoist
that Xunzi associated especially with an overemphasis of the natural
at the expense of the human. (Note however that Zhuangzi would not
normally be classified as a ru erudite, Confucian or
otherwise.) Interestingly, the passage aligns Xunzi with the Mohists,
apparently on the grounds of their shared commitment to a moral Way;
the association may also reflect the Mohists' deep influence on
Xunzi, mentioned above.

Book 8 of the Xunzi portrays Xunzi trying to convince King
Zhao of Qin of the worth of ru erudites. He begins by saying,
“The ru model themselves after the former kings.”
The use here of the word “fa” (“models,
standards”) is extremely important. In Xunzi's view, tradition
is important largely because it presents us with models of behavior,
and the only way to achieve social order is for people to try to
emulate those models.

The concept of fa became important in early Chinese philosophy
largely because of the Mohists. The Mohists had objected to
traditional rituals, arguing that many of their contemporaries
confused what is merely customary with what is right. They were also
suspicious of the idea that only educated elites have the cultivated
judgment necessary for virtue. They instead advocated promulgating
models or standards of behavior that (they claimed) all people can
easily apply to determine how to act. Among the standards they
advocated were the distinction between benefit and harm, the evidence
of the senses, and the will of heaven. They compared these standards
to devices such as compasses and t-squares, that artisans use to guide
their work. Such standards were what they called fa.

Xunzi adopted this idea, but turned it on its head by claiming that
the highest fa were the very rituals that the Mohists
denounced. These rituals required educated specialists both to conduct
them and to transmit instructions for their performance. Thus, Xunzi
rejected a key feature of the Mohist conception of fa,
according to which ordinary people can apply the fa without
extensive training. Instead, he made fa the province of an
educated elite devoted to the interpretation and transmission of
ritual texts, and this is one of the reasons he placed so much
importance on the ru erudites.

Xunzi's conception of fa escapes one objection to which the
Mohist conception was vulnerable. The Mohists paid no attention to the
question of how people are able to apply the fa correctly in
practice; one might say that they tended to treat the fa they
advocated as self-interpreting, so that there could never be any room
for error in the application of those fa to concrete situations
or issues. But there obviously is room for interpretation and error in
the application of the particular fa that the Mohists
promoted. Indeed, when the Mohists compare their fa to an
artisan's tools, this implies that correctly applying them
requires skill acquired through training. One might argue that the
Mohists' failure to recognize this implication speaks to a
significant flaw in their conception of fa.

For Xunzi, fa are not self-interpreting. Only someone who has
gone through an appropriate education will be able to apply them
correctly, and this education must be guided by a teacher who has
already mastered them. The teacher will both provide explanations that
are missing from transmitted texts, and evaluate the student's
attempts to apply what he has learned to concrete situations. This
expert guidance and judgment is essential to the student's
success; without it, no matter how intensively the student studies
traditional texts or observes the behavior of his contemporaries, he
is unlikely to learn the correct lessons from them.

Perhaps paradoxically, Xunzi did not see the goal of elite education
to be the acquisition of specialist expertise.
Gentlemen—educated men who had been elevated to positions of
power on account of their merit—were not for Xunzi specialists,
whether in the art of government or anything else. He specifically
contrasted them with farmers, merchants, and artisans, people who
according to Xunzi master the techniques specific to their areas of
expertise but who have no role to play in deciding the ends to which
their technical expertise will be put. Gentlemen, by contrast,
oversee the business of society as a whole, and regulate the
activities of the various specialists, without themselves mastering
any specialist techniques. The goal of elite education, then, is to
produce a comprehensive and guiding perspective rather than specialist
expertise, and the gentleman's understanding of fa should be
understood in this light. (Unfortunately Xunzi's extant writings do
not address the evident tension between these claims and the value he
places on ru ritual specialists.)

The relatively low value Xunzi placed on technical expertise is
nowhere more obvious than in his discussion of warfare in Book
15. Rejecting views associated with the Art of War, Xunzi
argues that military success does not depend on stratagems or on
specifically military techniques. Instead, it depends on gaining the
support of the people, and the way to succeed in this is to rule
virtuously, not to master military strategy. Thus, according to Xunzi
wars are won primarily by the civil elite, and not by military
specialists.

On these points Xunzi was asserting a fundamental disagreement with
the thinkers that are now often called Legalists. Legalists were most
concerned with developing institutions and policies that would be
effective even in the absence of virtuous rulers. For Xunzi, this
greatly exaggerates the efficacy of institutions and policies, and to
a large extent this can be seen as a disagreement over whether
applying fa correctly requires the sort of elite education that
Xunzi advocated for gentlemen. Indeed, “Legalist” is meant
to translate the Chinese term fajia, or school of fa;
and when Xunzi criticized the Legalist Shen Dao he did so saying that
Shen was obsessed with fa and neglected the importance of
having worthy individuals to interpret and apply the
fa.[6]

In its traditional arrangement, the Xunzi opens with a book
(or chapter) devoted to education. Called “Encouraging
Learning,” it insists that virtue can result only from a long
pursuit of learning—a pursuit that can never truly end. We find
a similar emphasis placed on education throughout the Confucian
tradition. Indeed, according to the Confucian Analects, it was
primarily Confucius's intense love of learning that set him
apart from other people. But education takes on an especially
significant role within Xunzi's philosophy.

In this opening book, Xunzi compares education to processes of
accumulation: the accumulation of individual paces that forms a long
journey, or the accumulation of small currents that forms a river, for
example. This choice of metaphor reflects the fact that according to
Xunzi the primary aim of education is to master a Way that is the
artificial product of human invention. It implies that education is a
lengthy endeavor that requires a great deal of effort and dedication
from the student; it is not something that comes naturally to us. It
also implies that education adds something new to the student; it does
not (as the Mencius sometimes implies) simply develop
pre-existing tendencies. Elsewhere, Xunzi adopts quite different
metaphors. For example, he sometimes compares the process of making a
person virtuous to straightening bent wood, a metaphor implying that
education fundamentally transforms a person's character. What
remains constant is the belief that education provides a necessary
addition to people's natural capacities, which alone are not
sufficient for virtue.

Xunzi's understanding of education and its importance reflects both
his pessimism about human nature and his faith in the perfectibility
of human beings. He believed that human nature provides a significant
barrier to moral improvement, but a barrier that can be overcome, and
that people's characters ultimately depend on the habits and
customs they acquire as a result of socialization and education, not
on their natures. Even “people in the street” have the
capacity to become sages—if they are raised well and they work
hard enough to acquire the right sort of education.

The curriculum that Xunzi advocated focused on the guided study of
certain canonical texts, including the Odes and the
(historical) Documents, as well as texts devoted to rituals and
music. These texts, if understood correctly, would provide the student
with models for both conduct and policy in the present; as noted
above, this required the presence of a teacher. Xunzi seems to have
placed little or no emphasis on learning general rules of behavior,
apparently assuming that we learn better from particular examples.

One might expect Xunzi's faith in the powers of education, as well as
his insistence on rule by virtue, to lead to a rejection of the need
for punishment. After all, both the Analects and the
Mencius argue that a virtuous ruler has no need for punishment
or other forms of coercion, and that recourse to punishment is a sign
of misrule. In the Analects, this view is associated especially
with the influence a virtuous ruler has over his subjects'
characters; in the Mencius, it most likely also reflects that
text's optimism about human nature. One might expect Xunzi to
draw a similar conclusion on the basis of his belief that all people
can be made good through education.

However, Xunzi drew no such conclusion, and instead considered
punishment to be an indispensable tool of government. He appears to
have thought that education will bring only an elite minority to full
virtue, and that the mass of humanity must be kept in line with the
threat of severe punishment. In Book 18 he goes so far as to argue
explicitly against the view that the ancients practised only
“image punishment,” which required the condemned to wear
clothes representing what Xunzi calls meat punishment; social order,
Xunzi claims, requires the actual use of meat punishment.

Xunzi's belief in the need for punishment, if not his insistence on
its most brutal forms, probably reflects not only his pessimistic view
of human nature, but also the elitism that is built into his
conception of social order. For Xunzi as for other Confucians, social
order requires a strict division between the rulers and the ruled. And
though he is officially committed to the perfectibility of all human
beings through education, and to advancement on the basis of merit
rather than birth, in practice he most likely saw education and
meritocratic advancement as limited to those whose social background
prepared them for entry into elite culture.

Xunzi conceived of the Way he advocated as an artificial human
invention, significant because of how it brings order to human
societies. The Way must be adapted to its natural context, and in
particular to features of that context (such as the scarcity of
natural resources and the facts about human nature) that place
significant constraints on human organization. But it need not
correspond in any more direct way to natural patterns, and we read in
Book 8 that “the Way is not the way of heaven, and it is not the
way of earth; it is the way for guiding people, it is what gentlemen
use as their way.”

In Xunzi's Chinese, the pair “tian” and
“di” signify the sky and ground, or, as they are
usually translated, heaven and earth. Together, heaven and earth
constitute the cosmos as a whole, or nature, with humanity often seen
as a third term distinct from both. (It is unfortunate that the usual
translation of “tian” as “heaven”
implies that tian stands outside nature; this was certainly not
a feature of early Chinese beliefs about tian.) The word
“tian” is often used synecdochally for both heaven
and earth, and so used is often contrasted with humanity. In this use
it is best translated as “nature,” and the contrast of
tian with humanity corresponds closely to the familiar
distinction between nature and culture. It is this contrast that
motivates most of Xunzi's discussions of tian, particularly in
Book 17 of the Xunzi, which is largely devoted to the issue
(and which is called “On Tian” in the received text
of the Xunzi).

Book 17 begins with the statement that “the courses of nature
(tian) have constancy.” The main point of this statement
is that nature (or heaven) does not respond to human action by
punishing the wicked and rewarding the good; nature simply does not
care what people want or do. For Xunzi, nature provides a fixed
context within which human societies either secure or fail to secure
order. What determines the success of a society in securing order is
how well adapted it is to nature's constancies. And nature (or
heaven) pays no attention to our attempts to achieve social order; it
neither judges our performance nor provides us with guidance.

It follows from these claims that it is wrong to interpret events
such as eclipses or natural disasters as omens sent by
heaven. Eclipses and other odd celestial events are just anomalies
with no significance for human beings; we are better off concentrating
on nature's regularities, such as the passage of the
seasons. Contrary to traditional belief, natural disasters such as
floods or droughts are not nature's way to signal displeasure
with a ruling family. They are just events that occasionally happen,
and which a society must be prepared for; their occurrence has nothing
to do with the ruler's virtue. It remains true that floods (for
example) lead to calamity only under bad rulers. But this is not
because heaven sends floods to punish bad rulers, but because a
virtuous ruler would have ensured that floods would not lead to
calamity, by maintaining the dikes so that rivers will not overflow,
for example, and by setting aside sufficient food stores to make up
for any lost harvest.

Xunzi occasionally refers to what he takes to be the ideal relation
of humanity to heaven and earth as “forming a triad.” This
expression has sometimes been interpreted to imply a mystical union
with the cosmos, or a correspondence between human and cosmic
patterns. But though these are ideas that would later become important
in the Confucian tradition, they are probably not what Xunzi had in
mind. According to Xunzi, heaven, earth, and humanity each have their
roles. Heaven and earth will fulfill their roles regardless of what
humans do, so we should concentrate on our own role, and not try to
influence how heaven and earth go about filling theirs. Our role is to
achieve order in human societies; if we manage this, then this is what
Xunzi refers to as forming a triad.

Thus, heaven and earth have a normative significance for Xunzi only
insofar as they provide the context for human societies: they provide
constraints that we must take into account, but they do not provide
the source or basis for human values and norms. This means in
particular that for Xunzi there is no question of wanting to obey
heaven's commands or of understanding the adequacy of his Way in
terms of a correspondence with cosmic patterns or principles. (He does
sometimes use the heaven/earth pair as a metaphor for human
hierarchies, with heaven as ruler and earth as subject. But this does
not imply that the value or legitimacy of human hierarchies derives
from heaven's superiority over earth.)

A corollary of Xunzi's philosophy of nature is a rejection of all
belief in non-human agencies. If, for example, spirits exist, then it
is as futile to try to win their favor as it is to try to win the
favor of heaven. This view gets expressed most clearly in his
discussion of the rain sacrifice, which he says has no effect on the
weather because it does not influence spirits; its legitimacy depends
on the contribution it makes to human culture. More generally, Xunzi
seems to have rejected a broad range of contemporary beliefs that we
would classify as superstitious, for example in the arguments against
physiognomy that constitute the core of Book 5 of the
Xunzi.

It is an interesting question to what extent Xunzi held a scientific
conception of nature. Certainly an interest in regularity as opposed
to anomaly is one of the factors that has distinguished sciences such
as astronomy from non-sciences such as astrology, both in China and
elsewhere. And in rejecting superstition and denying that nature has
any normative significance, Xunzi advanced claims that are often
associated with a scientific worldview. But whether or not his
conception of nature was in some sense scientific, his attitude
towards nature certainly was not. For example, he showed no interest
in investigating nature's regularities; one passage from Book 17
is often read as rejecting any such investigation. Further, there is
no reason to think that his reasons for rejecting superstition or for
denying a normative significance to nature were specifically
scientific; in discussing these issues he does not even raise
empirical considerations, much less specifically scientific ones.

Another issue much discussed in the secondary literature is the
extent to which Xunzi's attitude towards tian (nature or
heaven) had a religious dimension. This entry has sided with scholars
who take Xunzi's attitude to have been thoroughly secular. Another
view is that Xunzi did, contrary to occasional appearances, derive
value from tian, for example in his insistence that tian
has provided us with the capacities necessary for virtue. Also, some
passages, such as the passages according to which humanity should form
a triad with heaven and earth, are sometimes taken to imply that we
can achieve a sort of mystical union with the cosmos. Note, though,
that even if Xunzi held a religious attitude towards tian, this
does not imply that he anthropomorphized it. Though this was commonly
done by Xunzi's contemporaries (by the Mohists, for example), and
though tian appears to have entered Chinese religion as the
chief ancestral deity of the Zhou dynasty ruling family, it is clear
that Xunzi conceived of heaven in thoroughly impersonal terms even if
his attitude towards it was in some sense
religious.[7]

Xunzi's philosophy of human nature is based on a distinction between
those characteristics that arise spontaneously in people and cannot be
changed, on the one hand, and characteristics that are the result of
human effort, on the other. This corresponds directly to his
distinction between the fixed natural context of human society and our
attempts to respond to that context with artificial institutions and
practices. And just as the success and failure of human societies to
achieve order depends not on nature but on the Ways they adopt, the
success and failure of individuals to achieve virtue depends not on
their natural endowment, but on how they exert their capacities for
artifice.

Xunzi makes this distinction most explicit when, in Book 23, he
distinguishes between what he calls xing and wei. The
concept of xing picks out the spontaneous aspects of human
nature. Capacities such as the capacity to learn, which we exercise
only deliberately and with effort, do not for Xunzi count as
xing, but instead fall under the category of wei, or
artifice. This distinction is fundamental to his famous claim that
people's xing is bad, discussed below; this implies that
the tendencies that people acquire spontaneously tend to lead to bad
behavior, but does not imply that human nature as a whole as
bad. Human nature incorporates, but our xing does not, the
capacities that make virtue possible, because though all human beings
have these capacities, we do not exercise them
spontaneously.[8]

Among the spontaneous features of human nature that attract Xunzi's
attention, desire is most significant. Xunzi claims that all human
beings experience certain desires—primarily desires for bodily
satisfaction and comfort and for social honor and position—and
that we cannot reduce or eliminate these desires. The difference
between the gentleman and the common person lies not in their desires,
but in the actions they take to satisfy their desires. An implication
of this claim is that for people to become virtuous it is not
necessary for their desires to change. This is borne out by Xunzi's
discussion of the effects of ritual in Book 19, where he says that
ritual nourishes people's desires and ensures that their
behavior will be orderly, but does not say that ritual transforms
people's
desires.[9]

A consequence of Xunzi's distinction between xing and artifice
is that our xing does not distinguish us from animals. Instead,
what distinguishes us from animals is our capacity for
artifice—our ability to act independently of, or even contrary
to, our spontaneous tendencies. Xunzi does not explain this difference
in cognitive terms. According to a passage in Book 9, animals, like
humans, have knowledge; this is what distinguishes them from
plants. What sets humans apart is our capacity for morality and our
tendency to form norm-governed societies. (In this he agrees with
other Confucian philosophers, notably Mencius.) Perhaps this implies a
difference between human and animal knowledge. But even if it does,
Xunzi consistently drew the distinction between humans and animals in
social and normative rather than cognitive terms.

Xunzi's most pessimistic claims about human nature come in the course
of an argument against Mencius that occurs in Book 23 of the
Xunzi. Book 6A of the Mencius tells us that Mencius
defended the view that people's xing is good. Xunzi takes
this to mean that people will spontaneously behave correctly if they
are not interfered with, and argues to the contrary that
people's xing is
bad.[10]
His main argument is that if our xing were truly good, then
there would be no need for the institutions, such as the rituals and
duties, that the sages founded in order to bring order to human
societies. That we require these institutions to interfere with
people's natural tendencies is supposed to show that these
tendencies are originally bad.

The scholarly consensus is that this argument is based on a
misunderstanding of Mencian moral psychology. Perhaps the claim that
people's xing is good, taken in isolation, implies that
people will behave correctly if not interfered with, but in the
context of Mencian philosophy more generally it cannot have such an
extreme implication. Mencian optimism about human nature is based on
claims about our capacities for virtue, and about the naturalness with
which we can develop these capacities, not on the implausible claim
that we start out with naturally virtuous tendencies.

Xunzi gives a more sensitive interpretation of Mencian moral
psychology in another passage from Book 23, where he takes Mencius to
be saying that through education people's xing can be
made good. So interpreted, Mencius held that our spontaneous
tendencies can be extended and shaped, and that the aim of moral
education is to do this in the right way; the result is an improved
xing. Xunzi rejects this view, arguing that since education
requires effort it inevitably separates us off from our xing;
when he elsewhere writes that the sage kings transformed xing,
he presumably means that they replaced it with something else, namely
artifice. By responding to Mencius in this way, Xunzi emphasizes not
the inferior moral character of xing, but the need to
supplement it with artifice; and he is taking the underlying issue to
be the effort required for moral improvement. (Section 4B/26 of the
Mencius may agree that this was the fundamental issue in early
Chinese disputes about people's xing.)

It is the human heart that enables us to depart from our spontaneous
tendencies. The heart does not operate entirely according to
xing, for it is also capable of artifice. Because of this,
the heart can gain knowledge of the Way (cf. the discussion of the
heart in Section 8,
Epistemology,
below). It can use its knowledge of the Way to guide behavior, for,
Xunzi says, the heart is the ruler of the body: once it settles on a
course of action, it merely has to issue its orders, and the body is
sure to obey.

Xunzi calls the sort of judgment that the heart makes when it settles
on a course of action approval. He specifically contrasts
approval with desire, arguing that we inevitably do what our hearts
approve of doing, even if that goes contrary to our desires. In other
words, he argues that we always do what we think we should do, rather
than what we want to do. He thus commits himself to the view that
there can be no genuine cases of weakness of the will (though
unfortunately he does not say how he would account for apparent cases
of weakness). This is what allows him to claim that although correct
behavior is contrary to people's spontaneous desires, it does
not require a reduction or elimination of those desires. There has
been some debate in the secondary literature over the extent to which
Xunzi thought approval is truly independent of desire. One view is
that the heart's approvals are based on judgments about how best
to satisfy the agent's desires in the long term. However, it is
unlikely that Xunzi saw such judgments as playing an essential role in
action. More likely he thought that the heart's approvals
reflect the agent's character, which in turn is primarily the
product of socialization and
education.[11]

Indeed, from a comparative perspective, one of the most striking
features of early Chinese conceptions of action is the lack of
emphasis that they place on practical reasoning, and the concomitant
value they place on spontaneous or unthought behavior. For Xunzi,
action is guided by a sort of normative judgment, but he does not say
that such judgments always or even often issue from practical
reasoning. To the contrary, he takes it for granted that the
heart's approvals can and ultimately should be thoroughly
habitual. The process of habituation is not itself spontaneous, and
requires that the student overcome certain spontaneous tendencies, but
its outcome is a state in which, ideally, the agent always acts
appropriately but never requires thought or effort to do so. This
ideal of learned spontaneity might be explained with reference to the
performance of a highly trained athlete or, to bring out its aesthetic
dimension, a dancer. It is most fully realized in Xunzi's conception
of the sage. For example, in Book 5 of the Xunzi we read that
the sage “does not deliberate in advance, does not make early
plans, but what he puts forth is fitting.” The sage has mastered
the Way to such an extent that it has become his second nature to act
according to it.

Many critics have charged that Xunzi cannot account for the
possibility of sagehood, given his insistence (uncontroversial in the
early Confucian tradition) that the sages share the same nature as the
rest of us. When Xunzi tries to explain how we can become virtuous
despite our unlovely natures, he takes it for granted that the Way has
already been instituted and that we have teachers to help us learn
it. Of course this does nothing to explain how the sages were able to
institute the Way in the first place. And when Xunzi explicitly takes
up this issue (in Book 23), he conflates the ability to initiate a new
practice (such as pottery) with the ability to master a pre-existing
practice. To some extent, this may reflect the fact that Xunzi rejects
any attempt to adjust or replace the Way of the sage kings: as far as
he is concerned, the time to initiate new practices is long past, so
if he were to give an account of how people are capable of initiating
new practices (rather than simply mastering pre-existing ones), then
he would be explaining an ability he thought people should no longer
exercise.

Confucians of the Warring States period were not much given to
normative argument. When told that he had a reputation for loving
argument, Mencius is supposed to have denied it and insisted that he
simply could not avoid engaging in argument. (This exchange occurs in
section 3B/9 of the Mencius.) Xunzi's attitude was similar; at
one point (in Book 22) he goes so far as to write that the gentleman
engages in argument only if he does not have the political authority
to prohibit heterodox teachings.

Despite this dogmatism, Xunzi seems to have taken seriously the need
to provide his normative claims with some defence. He borrows his
basic strategy from the Mohists: they had defended their doctrines
primarily by making claims about the benefits of putting them into
practice, and Xunzi similarly argues that his Way provides the most
effective means for bringing order to human societies. He sometimes
does so by imagining a state comparable to Thomas Hobbes's state
of nature, in which people's attempts to satisfy their natural
desires lead to conflict, disorder, and poverty. He claims that
ancient sage kings instituted rituals and duties out of hatred for
this disorder, in order to transform people's characters and
thereby make social order possible. The implied argument is that the
Way of the sage kings is correct because of its consequences, in
particular because of its unique ability to produce social order.

Consider for example the discussions of ritual and music that we find
in Books 19 and 20 of the Xunzi. In the discussion of ritual,
he focuses on people's attempts to satisfy their desires, which
he calls seeking. He claims that if people's seeking behavior is
not regulated, then it will lead to disorder, and that traditional
rituals provide the means to regulate it. Music functions similarly,
giving shape to people's inevitable expressions of enjoyment,
which would otherwise lead to
disorder.[12]
In both cases, Xunzi defends the practices he favors by citing their
consequences, in particular the contribution they make to social
order.

The book that Xunzi devotes to music is especially interesting
because its primary foil is the Mohists. The Mohists had argued on
consequentialist grounds against the royal practice of organizing
elaborate musical performances. They acknowledged that music and its
associated practices (such as feasting) bring enjoyment, but argued
that they waste valuable resources and therefore should be
abolished. Xunzi's response to the Mohists consists in a series of
claims about the effects of (good) music; for example, he says that it
makes possible the peaceful expression of emotion, it leads to
harmonious conduct, and it distinguishes the noble from the base. He
thus adopts the Mohists' consequentialist argument strategy in
order to argue against their
conclusions.[13]

Consequentialist moral theories can be distinguished along a number
of dimensions. They might differ with respect to the items that they
pick out for consequentialist evaluation, for example. Among
contemporary western consequentialists, the main such division is
between those who focus on particular actions, and those who focus on
general rules of conduct. Xunzi, like the Mohists and other early
Chinese philosophers, focused not on actions or rules, but on
institutions and practices—on the various ways of organizing
human action that sum up to form the Way. We might thus describe Xunzi
as way- (or dao-) consequentialist.

Another factor that distinguishes different forms of consequentialism
is the standard or standards they use to evaluate
consequences—their conception of the good. Classical
utilitarians, for example, evaluate consequences according to the
amount of happiness or pleasure they include, whereas other forms of
consequentialism pick out other goods. In early Chinese philosophy,
conseqentialist arguments typically appeal to the material well-being
of a state's people, as well as to sociopolitical order
(zhi) more generally. This is certainly true of Xunzi, as we
see in his complaints that a lack of ritual leads to contention,
disorder, and poverty. It remains an important question how much he
builds into his conception of order, and of the good more
generally.

It is actually quite surprising how little Xunzi builds into his
conception of the good, at least in these normative arguments. The
Mohist argument against music, sketched above, assumes that the
enjoyment produced by music does not count as a good, and we naturally
expect Xunzi to reject this assumption. But he does not reject it;
indeed, he treats enjoyment as a possible source of disorder, and
defends music on the grounds that it helps avert that
disorder. Similarly, we might expect Xunzi to appeal to the aesthetic
properties of music, which the Mohists simply ignored, as a source of
value. But he does no such thing. His arguments imply that music's
aesthetic properties have value only insofar as they contribute to its
non-aesthetic effects. (The same is true in his defence of ritual:
though there are passages that make it clear that Xunzi had a profound
aesthetic appreciation for ritual, this plays no role in his normative
arguments.) In these arguments, Xunzi rejects the Mohists'
arguments, but does not dispute the rather narrow conception of the
good that they are based on; he implicitly agrees that music (and
ritual) should be judged solely on the basis of its practical
consequences.

Indeed, Xunzi's conception of the good may have been narrower than
the Mohists'. The Mohists had argued that in the absence of a
unifying political authority, families would be torn apart by
normative disagreement, and they regularly treat traditional family
structures as constitutive of social order and thus of the
good. Perhaps surprisingly, there is little evidence that Xunzi
followed the Mohists on this point. His normative arguments appeal to
the poverty and violence that he claims would prevail in the absence
of rituals and duties, but say nothing about families. And the rituals
and duties he defends on the grounds of their consequences appear to
include the rituals and duties specific to traditional family
structures. Thus, though Xunzi may end up recognizing a wider range of
values than do the Mohists, his normative arguments probably depend on
a narrower conception of the good than had the Mohists'
arguments.

Xunzi's normative arguments imply that the rituals and other
artificial social forms that Xunzi advocated have value because of
their effects, and not because they count intrinsically as goods. This
in turn implies that Xunzi's attitude towards these institutions and
practices was ultimately pragmatic: he viewed them as means for
adapting human society to its fixed natural context, including
especially the context provided by the spontaneous products of human
nature. Many scholars have been reluctant to accept this apparent
consequence of Xunzi's arguments, and indeed there are passages in the
Xunzi that seem to express quite a different attitude towards
the rituals. This has led some scholars to conclude that there are, as
it were, two Xunzis: one a pragmatic thinker ready to defend the
rituals on the basis of their alleged consequences, and the other a
more religious or dogmatic thinker, for whom the value of the rituals
was basic and could not really be called into
question.[14]
These two Xunzis may be different personas that Xunzi adopted in
different contexts or for different audiences, or perhaps they
represent distinct stages in his long philosophical career.

Whatever one makes of this issue, there is no question that Xunzi's
commitment to his Way was ultimately dogmatic. His consequentialist
arguments committed him to the claim that the particular institutions
and practices he endorsed, including the particulars of the ritual
tradition he favored, were uniquely capable of promoting order in
human societies; but the Xunzi offers no reason to think that
this claim is true. Moreover, Xunzi was resolutely opposed to any
attempt to make changes to the Way, whether to adjust it to changed
circumstances or otherwise; in his view, the time for innovation lay
in the distant past, with the sage kings. He thus recognized no need
to subject his claims on behalf of his Way to empirical test.

Early Chinese philosophers usually thought of knowledge in practical
terms. They took it to consist in the mastery not of facts but of ways
of acting (dao). Especially important was the knowledge of how
to draw distinctions. Drawing distinctions was the closest analog to
conceptualization recognized by early Chinese philosophers, and they
took it to be the fundamental cognitive operation. Indeed, at one
point (in Book 2) Xunzi tells us that drawing distinctions correctly
is what is called
knowledge.[15]

This takes knowledge to be a kind of ability rather than a sort of
representation of facts, and it should come as no surprise that Xunzi
did not explain cognitive errors by appealing to mistakes of
representation. For Xunzi, we make mistakes not because we picture the
facts incorrectly but because we lack some ability; knowledge
contrasts not with false belief but with confusion. Xunzi twice (in
Books 6 and 21 of the Xunzi) provides lists of his
philosophical opponents and diagnoses their errors, and in neither
case does he accuse them of misrepresenting the facts, or of confusing
appearance with reality. Instead, he charges that they placed too much
emphasis on some part of the Way, and thus failed to understand the
whole.

As Section 3
(Fa (Models), Teachers, and Gentlemen)
has already made clear, Xunzi thought that much of our knowledge
depends on mastery of fa. These fa include both
exemplars of various kinds of things and methods for determining a
thing's kind, and Xunzi thought that we often depend on these to draw
distinctions correctly. For example, to use an example of the Later
Mohists', in order to distinguish circles from non-circles, we might
use an actual circle, a mental image of a circle, or a compass; all of
these would count as fa. To a large extent, then, Xunzi
thought that to know X is to know how to use fa to
distinguish X from non-X.

However, there are hints that Xunzi thought that we are also able to
go beyond this sort of knowledge, and gain a more direct insight into
kinds. The passage that implies this most directly comes in Book 9,
and deals with judging legal cases; Xunzi says that when there are no
fa one must proceed according to the kinds. Here, fa are
presumably precedents or explicit legal guidelines, but it is tempting
to interpret them more generally as representing the knowledge that
one brings to a situation. Read this way, the point of the passage is
that we can adapt to new situations in ways that go beyond anything we
already knew how to do; doing this is what he calls proceeding
according to the kinds. Elsewhere he invokes a state he calls
“union with the kinds,” and it is plausible that he is
invoking the same adaptiveness. (Cf. the discussion below of
emptiness, unity, and stillness.)

Xunzi (like other early Chinese philosophers) took cognitive
activities to be distributed throughout the body, not the sole
responsibility of one particular organ. This view is most explicit in
a passage in Book 22 in which Xunzi explains how the sense organs make
it possible for us to distinguish between same and different. They
make this possible by drawing distinctions among their objects; for
example, the eyes draw distinctions among colors and among
shapes. Thus, the role of the sense organs is not to supply sensations
to be interpreted by a central organ that specializes in cognition;
they do (or at least begin) the work of interpretation
themselves. (Early Chinese philosophers also often assumed that
desires for sensory gratification are produced directly by the sense
organs.)

To the extent that Xunzi and other early Chinese philosophers
privileged one organ for its role in cognition, it was the
heart. (This leads some scholars to translate “xin”
as “mind” rather than as “heart.”) To some
extent, the heart works the same way as the (other) sense organs. In
the passage from Book 22 mentioned in the last paragraph, Xunzi says
that it draws distinctions among reasons, explanations, emotions, and
desires; by implication, it does so in much the same way that the eye
draws distinctions among colors. But Xunzi privileged the heart in at
least three ways. First, the heart controls the activity of the sense
organs (using what Xunzi calls sending knowledge) and of the body more
generally; it is the decision-making organ (cf. the discussion of the
heart in Section 6,
Human Nature and Agency,
above). Second, the heart can acquire new knowledge, whereas the
knowledge of the (other) sense organs of how to draw distinctions
among their objects is innate (he attributes it to people's
xing). And third, the heart, unlike the other organs, is able
to acquire knowledge of the Way.

Xunzi gives his most extensive discussion of the heart's
ability to know the Way in Book 21 of the Xunzi. Here Xunzi
sets out his most distinctive epistemological doctrine, that the heart
can come to know the Way through being empty, unified, and still. He
seems to borrow these three terms from texts that came to be
classified as Daoist, and some scholars take this whole discussion to
imply a Daoist influence on Xunzi. But even as he borrows Daoist
terminology, Xunzi rejects the associated doctrines. Within texts in
the Zhuangzi that advocate emptiness, for example, emptiness
requires emptying the heart of all knowledge. These texts construe
knowledge as prejudice: knowledge disposes agents to respond to
situations on the basis of past learning, when they would be better
off acting according to the demands of the particular situation. The
heart should function as a mirror, responding to the current situation
without storing anything up, and this is possible only if the heart is
emptied of all knowledge. The underlying conviction is that knowledge
separates us off from a spontaneous harmony with the non-human
world. Now, Xunzi certainly cannot accept these claims. However, he
agrees that what one already knows can undermine one's ability
to come to grips with something new, and that it is important to
prevent this from happening. In advocating what he calls emptiness, he
is in effect saying that it is possible to achieve all the benefits of
Daoist emptiness without trying to achieve that extreme form of
emptiness. In Xunzi's deflationary account, emptiness is a state in
which one temporarily sets aside one's prior learning so that
one can learn something new. This is what he means when he writes,
“Not using what one has already stored up to harm what one is
about to receive—call it emptiness.” Similarly, when he
advocates unity, he is rejecting the view held by some Daoists that
one can be truly concentrated on one matter only if one has given up
all knowledge of other matters; and in advocating stillness, he is
rejecting the view that one's knowledge can be orderly only if
one entirely quiets the movements of the heart. In each case, Xunzi is
responding to a worry that motivated some Daoists to embrace extreme
claims, but in his response he is implicitly rejecting those Daoist
claims.

Now, for the Daoists that Xunzi is responding to in this passage, the
whole point is to do away with knowledge; they held that someone in
the correct state of mind can respond well to changing situations
without the need for stored-up knowledge. By contrast, Xunzi sees
these states of mind precisely as the means to acquire and store up
knowledge, particularly knowledge of the Way. His primary interest
here is thus in the epistemology of learning. This does not mean that
he is concerned only with students. The opening line of the
Xunzi (in its standard arrangement) tells us that learning
never comes to an end, and it may be that Xunzi accepted enough of the
Daoist picture that he would have insisted that we need to be empty,
unified, and still even in the course of ordinary action, in order to
adapt our knowledge to new situations. That he accepted some of this
picture is implied by his apparent belief, mentioned above, that we
can adapt to new situations in ways that go beyond any prior
knowledge. Nonetheless, he could not accept the conclusion some
Daoists seem to have drawn from this, that we can make do without
knowledge, relying only on adaptiveness; for Xunzi, the ability to
adapt to a new situation depends on prior learning even when it takes
us beyond the knowledge we acquired as a result of that
learning. Admittedly his discussion of emptiness, unity, and stillness
does not explain why this is so (and this is a significant objection
to that discussion).

As with knowledge, early Chinese philosophers conceived of language
primarily in practical terms. They took its main function to be
guiding behavior and not, say, stating facts. Language guides behavior
not only when used explicitly to issue commands or suggestions, but
also by embodying value-laden distinctions, such as the distinction
between right and wrong. This perhaps becomes most clear among those
philosophers (now usually classified as Daoist) who argued that the
distinctions we draw in language cannot consistently provide good
guidance. For Xunzi, the guidance provided by language is essential
for social order, and this provides the motivation for his interest in
language.

Early Chinese philosophers' practical conception of language is
especially obvious in the Confucian doctrine of the rectification of
names. This doctrine focused on role-terms, such as
“jun” (“ruler”) and
“fu” (“father”), and held that bearing
one of these ‘names’ commits a person to certain norms;
conversely, if a person does not live according to the norms
associated with a role-term, then he or she is not appropriately named
by that term. One passage in the Confucian Analects implies
that it is an important purpose of government to ensure that people
act in accordance with the terms used to name their roles. There is
also a tradition that Confucius edited the chronicles of the state of
Lu so that rulers' titles reflected their true character rather
than their official rank. Similarly, section 1B/8 of the
Mencius refuses to classify as regicide the killing of the
wicked king Zhou, on the grounds that he was not truly a king.

Xunzi structures his main discussion of language (which forms the
heart of Book 22 of the Xunzi) as an attack on certain
paradoxical sayings that, Xunzi claims, promote confusion and
disorder. He begins by insisting on the need for uniformity in
linguistic usage, and by complaining that with the disappearance of
the sage kings language has fallen into disorder. He then discusses
three issues that he sees as fundamental to a correct understanding of
language, and relates each of these issues to a class of paradoxical
sayings.

The first issue he raises is the purpose of having names. He tells us
that we have names in order to illuminate noble and base and
distinguish same and different. By separating these two issues, he
came closer than does any other early Chinese thinker (at least in
extant texts) to articulating a distinction between fact and
value. But his aim is not to identify those uses of language that are
appropriate for the objective description of fact. The point of
distinguishing same and different, just like the point of illuminating
noble and base, is to ensure that the ruler's intent can be made
plain and that the business of government can succeed.

Xunzi associates a failure to understand the purpose of names with
sayings that “are confused about using names and thereby bring
disorder to names”; the examples he lists are “being
insulted is not disgraceful,” “sages do not care for
themselves,” and “killing thieves is not killing
people.” (The first is a saying associated with Song Xing; the
last is a view defended by the Later Mohists.) Unfortunately, Xunzi
does not explain how exactly a confusion about the purpose of names
leads to these sayings, or what constitutes the resulting disorder of
names. Presumably he is most concerned here with the practical
function of language, and the effects of trying to use these sayings
to guide behavior; but he does not tell us what those effects would
be.

Xunzi turns next to the question of what we follow in order to
distinguish same and different. His answer is that we follow the sense
organs. The function of the sense organs is to differentiate among
their proper objects (and not, say, to produce images). For example,
the eye differentiates among shapes, bodies, colors, and
patterns. Because we are members of the same species, our sense organs
perceive their objects in the same way, and this is what makes
agreement in the use of names possible. Xunzi here includes the heart
on his list of sense
organs.[16]
The function of the heart in this context is to differentiate
reasons, explanations, emotions, and desires. He also allows that the
heart has a further function that distinguishes it from the other
sense organs, and which he calls “sending knowledge.” This
reflects the heart's supremacy over the other organs of the
body; the apparent point is that the heart sends the sense organs to
gather knowledge about their objects. (Another interpretation favored
by some scholars is that this sending knowledge is a sort of common
sense that integrates the knowledge produced separately by the various
sense organs.)

A failure to understand the role of the senses in grounding
linguistic distinctions leads, says Xunzi, to confusion about objects
that brings disorder to the use of names. This confusion is manifest
in sayings such as “mountains and gorges are level,”
“the natural desires are few,” and “roast meat does
not add sweetness, great bells do not add enjoyment.” (The
second of these sayings, possibly along with the third, was associated
with Song Xing.) The implication is that one can recognize that these
sayings are wrong simply by correctly exercising one's senses;
Xunzi's concern is again presumably practical, though again he does
not give details.

The third and final issue that Xunzi raises is, as he puts it, the
essentials in regulating names. Here he addresses several theoretical
issues concerning language, claiming that confusion about these issues
leads to a third class of paradoxical saying whose effect is to bring
disorder to things. Unfortunately, his list of these sayings is
impossible to interpret with any confidence, and may be corrupt. The
last saying on the list appears to be a variant of “white horses
are not horses” (which is associated with Gongsun Long), perhaps
drawing on related discussions in the Later Mohist Canons.

Xunzi turns first to compound terms, insisting that single and
compound terms can be shared without difficulty. Here he is probably
referring to arguments of the sort used in the Gongsun Longzi
to defend the claim that white horses are not horses, which appear to
entail that nothing can ever be appropriately described both with a
compound term (such as “white horse”) and with a single
term (such as “horse”). Xunzi says that this is indeed
possible when the single and compound terms do not “repel”
one another, and appears to explain what this means by distinguishing
between terms of different level of generality. The word
“thing” (or “wu”) can be used for
anything at all; it is the “great shared name.” In order
to separate different kinds of things, we use “separating
names” such as “bird” and “beast”,
stopping only when we cannot further separate different
kinds.[17]
The point may be
that a single and a compound term do not repel one another when the
compound term distinguishes a part of the extension of the single
term, as is the case with “white horse” and
“horse.”

It is harder to relate the rest of Xunzi's discussion of language to
the sorts of paradoxical sayings he is primarily objecting to. First,
he claims that the appropriateness of names, and especially the
appropriateness of using particular names for particular kinds,
derives from agreement and custom, and not from any inherent
appropriateness. It is hard to know what apparent paradoxes could run
afoul of this modest conventionalism. (Book 2 of the Zhuangzi
may derive paradoxical conclusions from conventionalism about
kinds, but Xunzi does not raise that issue here.) The remainder
of his discussion is given over to a surprisingly abstract account of
the individuation of objects; Xunzi says that what distinguishes two
objects is not their characteristics (which might be the same) but
their position in space. It is possible that this was meant to
undermine paradoxical sayings dealing with number, such as “a
chicken has three feet,” but again it is hard to be sure.